A nice early morning start today - although the alarm was set for 5:00 am, I woke at 2:00, 245, 3:15. 4:00 4:30 and 4:58. For some reason I was convinced the alarm would not go off - despite both of the phones being set. Anyway, we caught the hotel shuttle bus to the airport at about 6:00 a.m. Despite the shuttle bus being very full, the terminal was almost deserted - indeed, we had to wait 20 minutes until the ticket counter opened up. Having checked in we got some breakfast (Yum, McDonalds) and went through security. We were caught the L.A. - New York leg of the Sydney - New York Qantas flight. It was packed, but it was a quite short flight - about 4 1/2 hours. With the time difference between L.A. and New York, it meant that we arrived at J.F.K. airport at around 4:30 p.m, so it was getting dark. The weather was quite a bit colder than we have been used to and the roads were packed almost all the way from the airport into Manhattan. Our hotel, the Element, has been given really good reviews on the web sites like Expedia. They have clean, reasonably sized (for New York) rooms that include a kitchenette, provide a basic but complimentary breakfast in the morning and on a Mon-Thursday, they provide free drinks and snacks in the afternoons. After checking in we walked down to Times Square and had amediocre meal at an Applebees. We strolled back to the hotel, which is very well located in mid-west manhattan. We have quite a good view of the Empire StateBuilding out of our bedroom window, which is on the 31st floor.